Still Life with Circuitry
by Ravenclaw42
Summary: A very silly short in which Remus attempts to explain computers to a technologyoblivious Sirius. Sequel of sorts to a similar story by Yma with her permission, which involved microwaves. A bit of cursing.


Notes: For fellow writer yma who wrote the fic "Remus Explains the Microwave" and subsequent comment that gave me the urge to write this sequel. Not nearly as... er... inventive as the original, but hopefully it's amusing. Yay for half-hour ficlets!

Choose your own timeline, btw. I choose to view this as being during the "lay low at Lupin's" vacancy. Slashy only if you squint and look at it sideways. And my own personal Remus is more informed in the ways of Muggle technology than this fic's Remus, but that was intentional.

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Still Life with Circuitry  
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Remus could not sleep. The reason he could not sleep was largely due to the huge, slobbering beast occupying most of his bed. And Sirius wasn't even in Animagus form, either.

So he sat in his study and bathed in the comforting blue glow of his laptop's liquid crystal screen and tried very hard not to nod off. He was working on a series of essays about the wizarding world -- more specifically, his own life and how it related to Harry Potter's. He supposed it was an autobiography of sorts, but he thought of it more as a contribution to all the arguments in Harry's favor. Sort of putting words down that he might not get to say in the case of his own demise.

He was thoroughly convinced that more people paid attention to your words after you were dead, anyway.

It was all a very nice thought and very practical in theory, but of course reality always has its catches, and Remus's main catches at the moment happened to be that he was an extraordinarily slow typist, he could not sleep, and on top of it all, he had writer's block.

"Bugger," he hissed under his breath, staring unblinking into the soft blue glow. It was a smug sort of glow, he decided. The glow was mocking him. It and the shitty two-and-a-half paragraphs he'd spent the last four hours writing were _definitely _ teaming up to mock him.

He didn't notice when the snoring in the next room stopped, but the loud thunk that rattled his bookshelves did manage to catch his attention. "Sirius?" he called through the wall, frowning.

"Oy!" came the muffled response. "Fine! I'm fine, nothing at all, my bad..."

Remus rolled his eyes. "Will you please stop wreaking havoc on my belongings, not to mention my house?"

"Am not!" There was a series of knocking sounds and finally Sirius' footsteps leading up to the door to Remus' study.

"Yes you are, you daft git," Remus retorted evenly.

The door swung open and Sirius' unkempt head poked in. "Methinks your bed is illegally narrow, Moony," he said, "and much too easy to fall out of."

"Methinks you should learn to sleep like a human being instead of a Rottweiler," Remus replied, "and stop mutilating perfectly good Shakespeare while you're at it."

Sirius grinned at the ritualistic verbal abuse and shuffled into the room. His hair looked like a bird's nest. Remus thought about saying so, but it just seemed so trite.

Sirius peered at Remus' laptop, curious. "What's that?"

Remus groaned inwardly. After the microwave conversation, he really didn't want to go anywhere near the subject of Muggle eckletronics again.

"It's a computer, Sirius," he said, "and let me please set it straight right now that there are no fairies involved in its function, nor is anything waving at you."

Sirius relaxed visibly. "Well, that's a relief," he said. "Fairies are untrustworthy little buggers, anyway..."

"Language, Padfoot," Remus said automatically, happily ignoring the fact that he'd said it himself five minutes ago. Sirius stuck his tongue out and gave Remus a derisive _ppbbbffffth. _

"Hmph." Remus crossed his arms and returned his glare to the screen, ignoring Sirius entirely.

Sirius squeezed around back of Remus' desk chair and peered at the screen. "So how does it work, then?" he asked, knowing and delighting in the level of torment it would cause Remus to try to explain.

Remus thought for a while. He thought about everything he knew of Muggle tekography, and eckletronics, and various other things he wasn't sure how to pronounce. He thought back on all the long, involved conversations he'd had with Arthur Weasley and Arabella Figg. He thought of his visit to the special research division of the Ministry dedicated to studying Muggle psychology and history in order to better understand Muggle society and how best to keep it segregated from wizarding society. He even tried digging back into his school days, when of course Muggles had not even invented computers, but they had sort of mostly invented calculators, which were sort of mostly the same thing, right?

But then he got sidetracked by staring at the half-filled screen and the little blinking cursor that was taunting him and the blue glow that had sucked away hundreds of meaningless hours of his life.

And he came to a conclusion. It was a much simpler conclusion than any other he had drawn in his life, and he said it with the kind of utter conviction that could only come from finally realizing the deepest truth.

"Pure evil, my friend," Remus said. "Computers run on pure evil."


End file.
